OPM Medical Disability Pensions: The Life We Lead

The life we lead may not be the one we chose; or, more likely, the life we “now” choose to lead — if we even have a choice.  One might argue that we always have a choice; the only real question is:  Are we willing to pay the price for the choices we make?

Often, we fall into things.  Human beings are complex creatures; the person we were years ago rarely is identical to the “now” of that individual.  Perhaps that explains the divorce rate in this country; of commitments encompassing “till death do us part” are rarely embraced, anymore.

And the choices which are out there make for compounding effects when it comes to the life we lead.  Decades ago, society imposed greater structural restrictions:  School teachers who were found to possess any tinge of moral turpitude would be dismissed and disgraced; heads of companies who divorced were summarily terminated; and those thought to hold rather unconventional opinions were shunned and often isolated.  Is this a good thing?

The perfection of a median — a point “in between” the two ends of a spectrum of excesses, or often referred to as the Aristotelian view of a good life — is often the balance to be sought.  The life we lead is, too often, solidified by the youthful indiscretions of excesses embraced in youthful vigor; whereas, in later years, regret tends to soften our extravagant early years.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who have come to a point in later life, where the Civil Service job which once required extreme energy, daily commitment and a stark challenge to even the healthiest of individuals, but now, in later life, medical conditions have reached a critical juncture where they are no longer compatible with continuation in that job — it is perhaps time to consider preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under FERS.

Contact a FERS Medical Retirement expert, that is, a U.S.-licensed attorney who specializes in the practice area of Federal Disability Retirement Law, and consider the life you lead and want to lead — now.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

Medical Retirement for FERS Federal and Postal Employees: Paralysis

It is the complete and total inability, whether by physical incapacity or mental breakdown, to engage and maneuver within and throughout the world.  Partial paralysis is just that — of some but not all.  The spectrum on which a medical condition can fall is determined by the severity of that paralysis — Can you do some, but not all, of the essential elements of the duties required in your position description?

Most people who have an injury or a psychiatric condition do not suffer from total paralysis, but from partial — and still can remain productive, but in a lesser capacity.

That is why Federal Disability Retirement allows the Federal or Postal worker who has successfully obtained a Federal Disability Retirement annuity to go out into the private sector, state, county or local government, and make up to 80% of what your former position currently pays — because, as stated previously, most people are not beset with complete and total paralysis, but merely some partial form.

All medical conditions, whether physical or psychiatric, have an impact tantamount to a form of paralysis; however, not all medical conditions are equal, and some allow for further productivity beyond the point where the medical condition becomes a chronic, permanent condition.

Contact a disability lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and don’t allow the medical condition — that “paralysis of life” — to prevent you from moving on in your life.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

FERS Disability Retirement Benefits: Jobs versus careers

We make a distinction between the two, do we not?  One merely “lands” a job, whereas we “pursue” a career, implying the arbitrary nature of the first and the delectable interest shown in the second.  Yet, the bifurcation of the two is never so stark as night and day, but can often be clouded in the grey of differences: Obviously, a “job” can be a career, and careers can take on many jobs in the upward advancement of one.

Thus, one can begin as a clerk, move into management, and ultimately become the President of a company; and while each job is distinguishable from the other, the entirety of the whole constitutes a “career” that one pursued.  Yet, we make the distinction especially when we are in “dead-end” jobs — those employment situations which disallow for advancement either in pay or in responsibilities (although, in some dead-end jobs, the responsibilities continue to expand without any increase in pay, which defines why it is a “dead-end” job because, in the end, you will end up dead by working too hard without a living wage).  And, while jobs in their totality and/or continuum of advancements may lead to a career, can a career become merely a job?

That question is rarely, if ever, asked, because careers are generally thought to be an elevated form of the lesser stature of “a job”, and as the higher standard cannot be subsumed or subjugated to the lower, it is normally not a valid consideration.  Yet, we talk in those terms, don’t we?  We hear statements like, “My career has stalled” or “His career has hit a glass ceiling”, or even, “Her career is going nowhere”.

Medical conditions, of course, can be a key element in the interference of a “career”, and in some sense, of transforming a career into a mere job.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of his or her positional duties, it may be time to recognize that one’s “career” has become a “job” precisely because of the medical condition.

The medical condition is the factor and element which has “stalled” one’s career, and it is time to then prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Consult with an experienced Attorney who specializes in FERS Disability Retirement Law in order to maneuver through the complex bureaucratic maze.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire
Federal Employee Disability Lawyer

 

OPM Disability Retirement: Leisure, nature’s antonym

Observe the animals excluding the human one; what do they all do, except perhaps the male lion who awaits the predatory prowess of the lioness and her cubs who hunt for the royal crown; and the rest, of constant pecking, searching, laboring just to survive.  Nature’s law requires survival; survival mandates predatory consumption; the rest look out that they are not in the sequence of a food chain that includes one’s self.  For, it is the resting bird, the supine squirrel and the slumbering rabbit that becomes the meal of Nature’s law.

Leisure, by contrast, is a relatively modern concept.  In the yesteryears when wagons traveled upon roads uncharted, and weekends were comprised of a Sunday afternoon beyond the morning prayers and sitting upon the hard bench of a preacher’s sermon about sin and hellfire, even then the food to be prepared for the evening meal, the water to be gathered from the river beyond the horizon, and the animals that required tending lest fences left rotting allowed for the nighttime burglars of foxes and coyotes to wander uninvited for an unsolicited meal; no, leisure is nature’s antonym, unknown and relatively unheard of except in these days of modernity, where the right to full weekends and paid vacations and “down-time” and sustained interludes of systematic quietude are a necessity within this world of constant razzle-dazzle in noisy streets of uninterrupted brackets of thunderous blaring where we cannot even think without being bombarded with informational overload.

Leisure requires time; time necessitates periods of calm away from the constancy of survival’s instinct, where the appetitive division of the soul is taking a break from the search for satisfaction, thus allowing for a reflective repose, an interlude of contemplation and a self-recognition that, yes, I am actually enjoying myself in doing this mindless activity or fun engagement.  Leisure is, in the end, nature’s antonym, in the very resistance to being able to relax, to reflect and to remain relatively rested in retrospective renditions of relentless reaping in the reality of raucous and riotous living (sorry about the alliteration, but it cannot be helped for fear of further farcical fancies fettered forever from feckless and foreign flattery).

In modernity, it has somehow become turned upside down, where leisure was once unheard of, dangerous to the very instinct of survival, and rarely engaged except in the slumber of midnight exhaustion.  Now, it is declared to be its very opposite – of a necessary means to survive, and without which work and ‘making a living’ cannot be accomplished because time away allows for the restorative powers to reenergize those proverbial batteries gone dead.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who need to contemplate filing a Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, there is little time to contemplate leisure as Nature’s antonym.  Chronic medical conditions tend to be a type of ‘work’ in and of itself – exhausting because of the constant attention it requires, and profoundly fatiguing upon one’s body, mind and soul.

That being said, obtaining a Federal Disability Retirement is necessary for precisely that reason – as a means of focusing upon one’s health, in order to attain a level of normalcy such that tomorrow can be another day to battle. In that sense, preparing, formulating and filing a Federal Disability Retirement application is an exception to the rule – for, it is not leisure as Nature’s antonym, but more likened to the days of yesteryear when the one time the body required leisure was to rest in order to regain one’s health, just to have another tomorrow to battle the greater world of predatory juggernauts.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Medical Retirement: Minding the ‘happiness principle’

Is there such a thing?  Certainly, enough authors, gurus and faith-healers have claimed it, packaged it and sold it as a commodity to be prepared, marketed and purchased.  Somehow, we are all gullible enough to believe in it:  Just as sorcerers of old possessed powers beyond human comprehension, so we hold on to the hope that such secrets of soothsayers mixing the concoction in a cauldron of expectations may boil over with fumes and aromas we can smell into oblivion.

That secret incantation; those mysterious sequence of codes (yes, which is why the Da Vinci Code was so popular – until it was made into a movie and the audience realized the farcical nature when bad literature is transformed into an ever worse media script); or perhaps it is a deal of Faustian proportions – of one’s soul for the hidden principle, the fountain of youth, the corridor down timeless ecstasy; instead, of course, in this mass-marketing world of consumer gullibility, we cling to the anticipation – despite all historical evidence to the contrary – that there exists a fortune-teller’s abracadabra comprising a happiness principle.

Principles are the foundational guidance for understanding the causal connections of events that occur in the objective world; first principles, as Aristotle liked to point out, are important in their revelatory powers to comprehend the operational mechanisms of this world of Being.  If you don’t know first principles, or the paradigmatic principles that operate behind the scenes – much like the Wizard behind the curtain —  then you will always only know that it happens, not why it does so.

And so we go through life, walking and wandering the streets, seeing others smiling, laughing and seeming to enjoy life, while we stew in the solitude of our private misery, perhaps outwardly attempting to feign such emotional brightness while inwardly decaying with each day’s tumult of angst and anxiety.

In minding the existence of the ‘happiness principle’, we are everyday falling into the statistical trap of that famous quip attributed to the 19th century Showman, P.T. Barnum, that there’s “a sucker born every minute.”  Even if everyday empirical evidence refutes the existential reality of such a principle, we nevertheless hope against fading hope for such a white knight in shining armor – that armor of protective fallacies based upon a nonexistent principle wrapped in the cloaking of hopes unearned and never to be attained.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are down in the dumps because of a medical condition, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the reality that one’s career may be cut short and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits may be a necessity, must fight against the false hope that a Federal Disability Retirement annuity is the “be-all” and “end-all” of life’s miseries.

Medical conditions may continue to remain chronic; there will likely remain many challenges in the future; but the point of filing for Federal Disability Retirement is to allow for one to attain a plateau of hopefulness where one can make one’s health and well-being a priority, without necessarily minding the ‘happiness principle’ or believing in P.T. Barnum’s secret to success.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire